


The Reality of Everything

by silversh



Category: No Fandom
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-12
Updated: 2014-11-11
Packaged: 2018-02-25 02:05:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2604554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silversh/pseuds/silversh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The dying die fast, but the living live long.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Reality of Everything

**Author's Note:**

> This is just a fun little story that I enjoy writing. I'm writing for your entertainment and mine, but don't be shy to leave a few tips and pointers! I'm always looking for ways to improve my writing!

_Meow. Meoooow. MEOW!_  
  
Fitz, one of my four cats, was pawing at the numb arm hanging off the homemade hammock that I was laying in. Fitz kept pawing at the arm, but it just wouldn’t move.  
  
 _Meooooooow._  
  
Looking down at Fitz hurt. My eyes were entirely too heavy and felt rather as if they were two semi-trucks sitting atop my face. So when I glanced down to see Fitz staring up at me through his big green eyes, I swore and clenched my eyes shut. Closing my eyes had given me some relief, but my head was still spinning and my breath still reeked of cheap booze. Ah, the sweet morning-after of a night well spent: the hangover.  
  
Upon trying to bring my hands up to rub my aching temple, I discovered that, lo-and-behold, the arm that Fitz was pawing at was mine. It was so utterly numb that even when I dragged my other hand over to shake it, it took a few shakes to get any blood rushing back into it. After about the fifth or sixth shake though, the pins-and-needles affect took place and my arm was mine again.  
  
 _Merow._ Fitz still sat by my hammock, looking up at me with those gorgeous green cat eyes. The rest of Fitz was a sleek black, and his nose was a pale pink. _Merooow._  
  
I was a little confused. I mean, I knew that hangovers didn’t necessarily lead down the road of clarification, but when I heard that last Merooow, Fitz’s mouth didn’t move. Fitz instead was walking away, seemingly bored with his hungover owner. Who the hell was meowing?  
  
I had three other cats besides Fitz. There was Gatsby, Will, and Cas, all of whom, including Fitz, were named after great literary people. Fitz and Gatsby were named after the great F. Scott Fitzgerald and his character Jay Gatsby from _The Great Gatsby_ , while Will and Cas were named after the infamous William Shakespeare and his character Cassius from "Julius Caesar." So, that last meow could've been any of the aforementioned cats’ meow, but my hungover mind could not think that complexly that morning. So as it went, I attempted to get up and find the owner of the mysterious meow.  
  
I had written out a list of do’s and don’ts of having a hangover. I made the list about a year ago after undergoing my very first hangover. I declared, after puking an unwanted amount of times, that I would from that moment on abide by that list. It went a little something like this:  
  
1\. Remain stationary  
2\. Don’t speak  
3\. Avoid sunlight  
4\. Keep all thoughts to a minimum  
5\. Cuddle with cats  
  
Unfortunately, that morning I did not abide by my list. I got up, or attempted to, out of my hammock. I immediately took a very ungraceful fall to the ground. Not even one of my cats came to the rescue. Such ungrateful little beasts.  
  
The fall made my head spin faster and my eyes feel heavier. My breath was like a rotten piece of fish sitting out in the hot summer sun and was making me want to pass out. The thought crossed my mind that, hey, maybe I should stop drinking so much and this wouldn’t have to happen, but then I thought about rule number four on my list and then that was that.  
  
“Hey, are you alright?”  
  
Was that a voice? Was it God? Maybe Buddha?  
  
“You’re looking a little rough.”  
  
Most definitely a voice. Not God/Buddha. The voice scared me. Not that it was a particularly scary voice, you know, with a deep russian accent and such a deep tone that even a Scandinavian throat singer would be jealous, but that it was the first voice I’d heard, besides my own, in more than eight years.  
  
“Are you sick?”  
  
The voice sounded scared when it asked that. As if being sick was the worst thing possible. No, I thought, just wickedly hungover.  
  
“Hey, I’m talking to you! Are you sick?”  
  
 _Calm down, buddy boy, I’m currently overcoming last night’s bottle of gin. Take it easy._  
  
“Jesus Christ, man, seriously, just look at me. I need to know if you’re sick.”  
  
1\. I was not a man, and, 2. I could not look at you even if I tried, because, 3. I WAS HUNGOVER. So I stayed in the same position I had fallen into while I listened to the voice become increasingly agitated.  
  
“Look, man, my sister here is sick, and I mean, like, really, sick. Darwin’s Flu, you know? Surely you’ve heard of, I mean I don’t know how you couldn’t’ve, but anyways I need to know if you’re sick or not because like I said my sister is really sick and I, I just...I need help.”  
  
The voice cracked as it spoke those last three words and my mind had begun to ignore rule number four on my list as it thought about Darwin’s Flu. Of course I’d heard of it. It was a strain of Influenza that nobody took seriously until it was too late and then, whoops, half the world’s population was dead. Have you ever heard of that guy named Darwin, you know, Survival of the Fittest, and what not? Well, the scientists that weren’t already dead named this strain of Influenza Darwin’s Flu because at first, people were crazy enough to believe that the strain was God’s way of getting rid of the weak and unfaithful and yattah yattah yattah. But I guess Darwin’s Flu was like “Yeah, fuck that,” and just started killing everybody, no matter if you were weak, strong, religious, or nonreligious.  
  
“Not sick,” I said to the voice, ignoring rule numero dos on my list.  
  
“Are you sure? Cause, uh, you look bad. And, uh, the smell in here is just-”  
  
“Not sick, dude.” God, this guy was making me break too many rules on my list. Just then, I had the bright idea (breaking rule number one) to try and sit up. Upon miraculously achieving that, I had yet another idea to speak (breaking rule number two). “Name?”  
  
I had meant to say “What’s your name?” but somewhere between my muddled thoughts and my lips, “What’s your” got cut out, so, “name” it was.  
  
“Walt. And Jorie. Walt and Jorie,” said the voice. My eyes were being little shits and refusing to focus, so when I tried to connect the voice to a face, all I got was a blur. But I did have a name, so the blur’s name was Walt.  
  
“Nice to meet you Walt and Jorie,” I said, although it was certainly not nice to meet Walt and Jorie. They were disrupting my post-hangover time and item number five on my list still needed to be tended to. My cats were waiting.  
  
“Do you have a name?” asked the blur named Walt.  
  
“Yes,” I so replied.  
  
“Well, what is it?”  
  
Living on your own in an old abandoned Quick Shoppe in the middle of an old abandoned campground somewhere out in the middle of Canada has it’s perks. For example, no visitors. No visitors to just come in one random June morning and ask you for your name. Your name, of which, you’re not even sure what it is. You see, I was an orphan. As was about 90% of the other remaining children in the world. My parents became victims of Darwin’s Flu when I was circa eight months old. I think their names were Diana and Oscar, but I wasn’t for sure. I had one thing to my personal belonging that might’ve been a hint to what my real name was, but it was just an old sheet of paper that I’d had with me for as long as I could remember.  
  
I guess Darwin’s Flu was around before I was born, because the sheet of paper was like some official shit or something stating that Diana and Oscar Emmerich of South Bend, Indiana and their daughter, Rebecca Emmerich, were vaccinated for Darwin’s Flu. The paper said that we/they/whoever they were, were allowed to cross over the Canadian border into Canada and on to some Home For The Vaccinated.  
  
But, even it that piece of paper really was mine and I was Rebecca Emmerich, daughter of Diana and Oscar Emmerich, I didn’t identify with it. It was just a piece of paper that I’d always had with me and had never been able to let go of.  
  
One thing I did identify with, though, was literature. My little Quick Shoppe was crammed with any book I could find when I went out on my hunts. My personal favorite was a book of Virginia Woolf’s collective poems, and I read that book every night before I went to sleep, so one day I just decided to name myself Woolf.  
  
“Woolf,” I told the blur named Walt.  
  



End file.
